Last issue covered the basics of being a dependable, righteous band musician if you’re just starting out. Let’s now get past the philosophy and start practising. Sure, you’ve always loved music – maybe you played it as a littlie and now you’re serious enough to join a band. But there is a world of difference between taking guitar lessons and playing in a band. This article will get you ready for that experience, and maybe give you some perspective and development goals if you’re already jamming with your mates. ...more

Dion Lunadon (Palmer) just loves being on the rock’n’roll stage. He played pivotal roles in The Snitches, Marty Sauce and The Source, Nothing at All and The Rainy Days before forming local heroes The D4, following that with The True Lovers and now seminal (and serious) New York noise merchants A Place To Bury Strangers. Born March 1976 at Auckland’s North Shore Hospital, to parents more interested in Abba and Barry Manilow than Elvis or the Stones, he was forced into piano lessons from the age of six. It wasn’t long before the leather clad grip of rock’n’roll took hold. Picking up a guitar in his early teens he figured out his first song – Motley Crue’s Too Fast For Love, obviously. ...more

With her first single, You’ll Never Take That Away, Jamie McDell’s acoustic blend of folk and pop, along with a fair bit of country, has started making appearances on our TVs and commercial radio stations. ...more

While recording Lydia Cole's debut album ‘Me and Moon’ at Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios in Newton last year, during lunch, one of the engineers walked into the kitchen where the band was eating. In a tone suggesting it was nothing special, he said three words: ‘It’s snowing outside’. Like kids, grins Lydia Cole, she and her band jumped from their chairs out onto the street, dancing in the snow. ...more

Will Saunders, formally of Auckland trio The Quick And The Dead has been toiling away on his own ‘odd folk psych’ solo project since August. He has previously spent time amongst the smoky streets of London and whilst there says he learnt some important truths about making music. ...more

At the beginning of April David Ridler left his role as Assistant NZ Music Manager at NZ On Air to return to the land of commercial radio – whence he had come four years earlier. David proved a great fit for the challenging NZ On Air role. An active and knowledgeable lover of music, he is the kind of person anyone would feel they’d get a conversation and sympathetic hearing from. It was his second stint with the funding agency and his focus included the development and bedding in of the new MakingTracks funding scheme. On the eve of his departure back to radio NZM fired him a quick salvo of questions about his past and future roles. ...more

It’s now over a year since the last of Christchurch’s two major earthquake events brought the city quite literally to its knees, necessitating the closure of the CBD area, and along with it most of the city’s live music venues. That time has seen disputes and frustrating delays but as 2012 gets going properly, so too has the Garden City’s entertainment scene started to return to life. First some of the inner city venues then Lyttelton’s Wunderbar. There’s life in the old girl yet. Marcus Winstanley who, in his spare time, is the Programme Leader of Live Sound and Event Production at MAINZ in Christchurch, agreed to undertake the ambitious task of giving NZM readers a round up of the current live music scene from a gigging musician’s viewpoint. ...more

Born on New Zealand’s North Island in rural Tangowahine, Doug Jerebine, aka Jesse Harper, first established himself as a guitarist with a reputation in Auckland bands including The Embers and The Brew during the early 1960s. However, for Doug it wasn’t to be all about hedonism and heroism. An interest in Indian music shaped his spiritual beliefs and directed much of his adult life. Before making the pilgrimage to India, where he was to remain for almost four decades, Doug detoured to London, adopted the name Jesse Harper, and in 1969 recorded what would become known as the ‘lost’ Jesse Harper album. Having settled back in Aotearoa after an absence of 40 years he has landed a release for that forgotten album with Chicago indie label Drag City. Doug Jerebine is gigging and recording again, his extreme guitar wizardry proving remarkably intact. ...more

Winner of the 1998 NZ Young Composers’ Award, Ewan Clark began his compositional study at the University of Otago before moving to Victoria University in 2001, where he completed a Bachelor of Music and Graduate Diploma in Arts. He’s a composer, teacher and conductor who was accepted last year into the Royal College of Music in London, in fact ranking among the top percentile of all applicants to the Composition for Screen course at RCM. He is currently studying there towards a Masters of Music, condensing the normally two year course into one. ...more

There are an increasing number of small independent record labels emerging that represent perhaps only one or two artists. One by-product of this change is that the royalty models offered by these smaller independent record labels are often quite different to those previously offered by the majors. Understanding the difference between the two approaches is important for both artists and any new emerging record labels alike. ...more

Just as a facemask can hide the identity of its wearer, so can a sound wave hide the identity of another. Masking is a psycho-acoustic phenomenon that occurs when one sound conceals another sound. The effects of masking can render a sound completely inaudible, but more likely, a certain element to the sound will change. For example an instrument may sound superb in isolation, but when combined with others in the recording mix it might lack warmth, body, clarity etc. This article aims to illustrate the basics of the phenomenon and offer several methods that may reduce the problem. ...more

And the Oscar goes to… our Bret! The boys from Flight of the Conchords are used to receiving high accolades, and deservedly so. Few Kiwis get to put NZ music so prominently on the map and their output is of such a consistently high standard and now, with an Oscar statuette in the collection, they have surpassed the benchmarks set by Don’t Dream It’s Over and How Bizarre. ...more